Speaker 1: Hi everybody, welcome back. Brand consistency is everything. So I want to talk to you about eight ways to make your brand more consistent. So in lots of organizations, particularly larger organizations, it's really easy for a brand to get lost. There are a lot of people creating assets, there are marketing departments and sales departments and production units who are all creating assets for the brand constantly. People develop alternate logos or alternate colors or grounds or photography treatments or tones of voice that over time compile into just a jumbled mess and they lose that aspect of consistency. So the larger the organization, the more you have to pay attention to brand consistency because it's more easy for that consistency to get lost over time. The smaller organization, it's easier, but the things I'm going to talk about in this video are just as important to small organizations as they are to large ones. So what happens when a brand loses its consistency? What happens is customers lose trust. It confuses them. They have a harder time recognizing the brand when they come across it, across all of the brand's touch points. And this creates a lack of trust and trust is everything in branding. So consistency in branding is paramount in maintaining and building customer trust. It can also be confusing to internal teams. So internal stakeholders have a tendency to kind of get confused about what the brand looks like or what it sounds like or how it's supposed to show up. So policing this aspect of your brand is a really important aspect of branding, of managing a brand. Now number one is the first thing is that you have to understand why brand consistency really matters. Brand consistency projects professionalism. If you are haphazard, you show up in different ways or you're not consistent in your visual branding, your verbal branding, in your product branding, people think you are less professional. That's just a fact. So by being consistent, it establishes a level of authenticity. It's staying true to your core reason for being. It provides clarity in what you do, who your company is, who you're trying to serve and what you stand for. It builds that level, as I said before, of customer trust. And it also offers an internal direction. So the stakeholders and employees of a company are very clear about what their company stands for and how it's supposed to present itself in the marketplace. Also having a consistent brand provides simplicity to all the actions that you take. Not only does it provide simplicity to the customer and how they experience the brand, but it also is providing simplicity to the stakeholders and the people who are doing work for the brand. So the marketing department, the production people, the product designers, having a simple and clear brand also makes it clear to them what they're supposed to do. So they're not floundering around and trying to find solutions that there aren't answers for or that they have to invent themselves. Number two, brand identity and a consistent brand affect business success. WPP, which is one of the largest holding companies of agencies in the world, did a study where they discovered that if you have a consistent brand, your company is three times as likely to last 10 years in business than one that isn't. Brand identity links directly to a business plan and to a business's strategy. It's not just a pretty picture. Your brand design is a strategic exercise and strategic expression of what your company and what your brand is. The colors, the fonts, the logos, the imagery, they all communicate through something called semiotics, which is a scientific interpretation of what symbols are perceived to mean. When people understand this, that branding and brand consistency is linked to strategy and that brand design is linked to semiotics and how people perceive things, they're much less likely to create their own thing to solve some particular problem. It's a scientific exercise and it's very well documented that consistency in branding and visual branding affects business success. Number three is you want to create a brand guide. A brand guide or brand guidelines is essentially a Bible for the brand. It includes all of your strategies, so things like brand mission, value propositions, differentiators. It also kind of makes clear and codifies your tone of voice, your logo, your colors, your fonts, your photography treatment, your signage specifications, your media formatting, your photography and graphic styles. All sorts of things are illustrated in a brand guideline. And then that brand guideline is trained throughout the organization, which leads me to number four. Number four is you want to share and disseminate that brand guideline, that brand Bible across the organization and you want to train people in the usage of it. It should be incorporated deeply into the whole organization. It needs to be used and available to all departments, including the sales team, the marketing team, the product development teams, the production teams. Also you want to share it across third party vendors or freelancers or consultants or anyone that you do business with outside of your company because they're creating assets for your brand and they may not understand your brand tenants, your visual brand rules and guidelines as well as people do inside of the company. So you also want to disseminate your brand guidelines outside of the company to whoever is doing and creating assets, marketing assets, visual production assets for your company so they don't go creating things on their own. Now the fifth way you want to maintain brand consistency is you want to make sure you're doing regular audits of the brand, essentially policing the brand. You want to use the brand guidelines to look at all the branded assets that are out there on a regular cadence so you can kind of herd the cats and make sure that nothing's being done or put out into the world that's inconsistent. The things you want to look at are things like webpages and social media posts and brochures and letterhead and business cards, presentation deck templates. You could look at store decor and labels and packaging and music and employee uniforms. Just about everything that's a brand touch point you want to make sure is within the scope and within the rules and guidelines of that brand Bible. Number six is brand tone of voice. Tone of voice is one of those things that gets forgotten about a lot of the times. Whether it's your copywriting or your verbal tone of voice, how things are said either in social media, on video, on podcasts, the tone of voice of the brand needs to be consistent as much as the visual branding needs to be. All of it should be the same. Number seven has to do with core values. Core brand values are what your organization stands for. They are the pillars of your brand identity. They're used to build relationships with clients and used to inform how you show up in every single brand touch point. These are things like a mission statement or an elevator pitch, how you talk about the brand and what the values that that brand stands for are. All of these need to be socialized or trained to all personnel within the organization. So they're all, as we say, singing the same song. They're all talking about the brand in the same way. They're all personifying the values of the brand and everything that they do. And number eight seems a little counterintuitive, and that is that all brands evolve. Brands and brand consistency doesn't mean that a brand is static and never ever changes. All brands change over time. Look at Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola has been around a hundred years. The logo is still relatively the same, except their branding, their tone of voice, their advertising, their marketing, their design has changed dramatically over that hundred years. But I guarantee you, because they are the most recognized brand in the world, those choices to change and evolve the brand have been very planful and very strategic over time. So you have to accept that society changes, products change, companies get acquired, people come and go, the aesthetics and design change. A brand has to evolve, but you want to make sure that the changes in your brand are strategic, they're thought through, and that they're then communicated through the organization so everyone knows what's going on and is following the guidelines in the brand Bible to maintain that level of consistency. So that's it. I hope you enjoyed this video on eight ways to maintain brand consistency. And if you did, please hit subscribe and bing that notifications bell so you can get alerted when I go live or when I post something new. And visit me at philipvandusen.com if you need help with your brand strategy, your brand design, or your professional creative career, reach out to me and let's see what we can do to take it to the next level. And with that, thanks again for watching. Bye for now.